“Comrades of the Quest
is as dramatic as the best of fiction, beginning with a complex and doomed
central character —William Trufant Foster, the 31-year-old visionary idealist
and first president of Reed College. It’s a great story, brilliantly
constructed and told from multiple and brief, always shifting, points of
first-person view. The story never lags.”

–Robin Cody, author of Ricochet
River and Another Way the River Has

Photo: William Trufant Foster surveying the future Eastmoreland site of Reed College, 1910.

Visionary. Iconoclast. Rebel. William Trufant Foster set out
in 1911 to launch the “ideal college,” and succeeded in building an
intellectual liberal arts powerhouse that over the next one hundred years would
perpetually seek to break the
hard crust of custom and orthodoxy. Foster’s quest for excellence and truth
generated a
steady yield of students – ranging from poet Gary Snyder to muckraker Barbara
Ehrenreich to Apple founder Steve Jobs – who left Reed College eager to
challenge society’s dominant paradigms.

Comrades of the Quest chronicles the colorful cultural and social history of this band
of young and fiercely unorthodox West Coast intellectuals, and of the
institution that nurtured them. Drawing from interviews with more than 1,400 people and from
unpublished memoirs stretching back to the college’s first decades, John Sheehy
weaves together a riveting story told from first-hand perspectives of this
unique community’s ongoing efforts to bring Foster’s vision to life.

With
a punch considerably mightier than its weight, the Reed community undertakes an
arduous journey through the political and educational developments of the past
century— from the progressive education movement in the 1910s, the
general education programs between the two world wars, scientific methodology
in the 1950s, political relevance in the 1960s, theories of structuralism and
deconstruction in the 1970s, the cultural wars in the 1980s, political
correctness in the 1990s, to ideological bias in the 2000s—while keeping its
founding ideals largely intact.

At
a time when America is struggling to sustain its innovative edge, Reed College
remains an iconic model, equipping students with a rigorous set of
skills and attitudes possible for questioning status quo thinking in a rapidly
changing world. Its
story, populated with a rich cast of characters, and marked by intense focus,
demanding social freedom, and unconventional creativity, is no customary college
history, but rather an intellectual thriller of American idealism played out
against the hard world of social, religious, and political conformity, ascending
great heights and persevering through near-fatal confrontations.